Do Even More To Make Vote Competitive

OTHER VIEWS - MY WORD

One of the aspects of Election Day last week - the general aparthy of voters - caused me to reflect on the future of our republic.

A look at the races in Florida for the U.S. House of Representatives illustrates the point.

Florida has 23 House seats. All 23 incumbents were returned to office. That in itself is not too surprising. After all, throughout the nation, between 96 percent and 98 percent of incumbents were returned to office. What is discouraging is that 15 of the 23 Florida seats were uncontested (11 Republican-held seats and four Democrat-held seats).

The eight contested seats - and I use the term ``contested'' loosely - were won by the eight incumbents. This ``incumbent advantage'' points up the need for term limits.

Oh, I know, some people will say that we already have term limits - because House races are held every two years; but too often the defeat of an incumbent is extremely rare.

In Florida, the names of those running uncontested do not even appear on the November ballots, because the primary elections constituted the actual election to office. However, consider this: In primary elections in Florida, crossing party lines was not permitted. So, if a Republican, say, was unopposed, then Democrats had no voice in the election of their representative. The opposite is, of course, true, too. All of those who registered in the ``wrong'' party were disenfranchised. The same was doubly true for those who registered as independents - they couldn't vote for anybody in the primaries! And we wonder why less than 50 percent voted on Election Day?

Well, in this election there was an initiative on the Florida ballot that sought to rectify the problem: Revision 11, which will permit all voters, regardless of party, to vote in primaries in which the winning candidate would be unopposed in the general election. This constitutional revision passed by a very large majority. It is a good first step in providing truly open elections.

The two main parties strongly opposed this initiative by offering the preposterous notion that, in such a primary, one party could have its voters cross the line to vote for a very weak candidate in the other party. That would require impossible massive collusion.

Beyond Revision 11, we need a couple of other election reforms.

When minor-party candidates begin to appear on the ballots, there will be many cases in which the candidate who gets the most votes gets only a plurality, not a clear majority. In such a case, the two candidates who received the most votes should face each other in a runoff one week later.

Next, it has been proposed that elections be held on Saturday, when fewer people have to work.

I believe that it would be even better to hold elections on Sunday, following the example of most other countries in the world, especially the European democracies.

These measures would help return us to truly representative government.